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“How strange it was that the music people favored defined them in so many ways—what they liked, what they rejected, what stuck with them from their school years, what they kept, what they burned into memory, what they let go. How was it that what they heard in a single decade—for most, their second on the planet—encoded a set of remembrances that stayed with them forever? It was simply commercial output, a business after all, nothing more than that—song factories a few years removed from Tin Pan Alley. It wasn’t Beethoven or Mozart, but it was glue—happy and sad, lived and imagined, the soundtrack of youth became the soundtrack of peoples’ lives.” — Ken Goldstein
How strange it was that the music people favored defined them in so many ways—what they liked, what they rejected, what stuck with them from their school years, what they kept, what they burned into memory, what they let go. How was it that what they heard in a single decade—for most, their second on the planet—encoded a set of remembrances that stayed with them forever? It was simply commercial output, a business after all, nothing more than that—song factories a few years removed from Tin Pan Alley. It wasn’t Beethoven or Mozart, but it was glue—happy and sad, lived and imagined, the soundtrack of youth became the soundtrack of peoples’ lives.